May Beattie, authority on oriental rugs; born Edinburgh April 13, 1908, died February 1997

ORIENTAL rugs have been popular in the UK for several centuries, but it was May Beattie's research into their manufacture and origins that turned them into a genuine collector's art form.

May Hamilton Christison was born in Edinburgh. She graduated from the University of British Columbia with a BA in 1929. Three years later she gained a PhD at Edinburgh University.

May then began a medical degree which was abandoned in 1937 when she married Colin Beattie, who had just been appointed professor of bacteriology and director of the Pasteur Institute in Baghdad.

She took an immediate interest in the rugs and hangings she saw in the bazaars. Her scientific training led her to examine the materials closely and she began her collection.

In 1943 she returned from war-time evacuation to India and took up a post at the British Embassy.

The couple returned to England in 1946. May then began research into carpet manufacture in Europe, North America, and the Orient, writing many articles on the subject.

In 1961 she wrote an article on the Burrell Collection's oriental rugs for the journal Oriental Art, and in 1972 she produced the catalogue for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection of Oriental Rugs. Four years later put together at the Mappin Art Gallery in Sheffield the Carpets of Central Persia exhibition, acclaimed for illustrating the enormous variety of design belonging to one particular type of carpet.

''She used her training as a scientist to make sound judgments,'' says Jennifer Weirden, oriental rug expert at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

A formidable scholar, May worked closely with the American historian Charles Grant Ellis, who predeceased her.

She has left her rug collection and her library and archive to the Ashmolean, Oxford. She has also set up a visiting fellowship for carpet studies at Oxford.